Thinker – Creator – Sensemaker

2012: my boss wants me to dance!

We are getting towards the end of the year, and time has come to nail down the Innotribe 2012 objectives of our team members.

Last Friday, I had my regular 1-1 with my boss Kosta Peric @copernicc – Head of Innovation at SWIFT. We had a really good discussion, challenging each other vigorously on what would be the best use of my time and talents in 2012.

Just the fact that we start from a strengths based paradigm is typical for how we get around these things in the Innotribe team. It remembers be the blog of Venessa Miemis on “Framework for a strengths-based society”.

And as digital identity and digital footprint are some of the topics that have deeply infected me virally, I was wondering why not apply the principles of sharing to my objectives 2012. So far, I don’t recall anybody doing this, and reflecting on it: why not?

It’s a good way to articulate your agreement with your manager, and then to share it in the open with your followers: one way or another, this adds to your personal transparency, and on the other hand I feel it makes me commit stronger to these objectives as it’s now in the open, and shared with your followers. And applying the principles of crowdsourcing and open innovation, the worst that can happen is that my followers come up with ideas to better implement my objectives.

My objectives are organized around following clusters:

Sensing and curating for Innotribe Events

Internal Evangelism

Digital Asset Grid

Innovation seeds for Lite Application Platform

Sensing and curating for Innotribe Events

Like in previous years, I will use my “antennas” to sense what’s happening at the edges of our ecosystem. Spotting the new themes and inspiring igniters that help shape our Innotribe events.

I will focus and be involved in the following main Innotribe events:

Innotribe stand-alone events: Bangkok in April 2012, and Belfast in June 2012

Innotribe @ Sibos Osaka, from 29 Oct – 2 Nov 2012

My role is that of “content curator”: these themes are the basis for my “painting” of events. It’s the architectural canvas. After conceptually agreeing on this main direction, the fantastic Innotribe facilitation team gets into action and shapes the events into immersive learning experiences. In many of our events in 2012, we will inject a “Start-Up Competition” under the leadership of Matteo.

The “technical” themes I have in mind today – this may still change in the coming weeks/months – are about: API’s, The Age of the Machine, Augmented Reality combined with big data.

The “non-technical” themes are about: Organizational Fitness, Hypereconomics, and new approaches to Innovation. And some of the 2011 themes will be re-enforced and go mainstream: Future of Money, Banks for a Better World, Digital Asset Grid.

We have some early wild ideas on how we can excel the 2011 experience of our Innotribe events: in 2012 we are going to play all senses, and looking into performance elements based on art, dance, and music. We also have some ambition to inject young people (20-25 years) into everything we do.

Internal Evangelism

In many of my previous blogs – especially the one on the digital asset grid – I have been using the metaphor of “the dance”.

So far, I “dance” quite well with the outside world of SWIFT, but I will now apply that skill more to the “internal dance”. Getting from just “shooting some bullets” and scaring the hell out of my colleagues, towards “dancing together” and making sure that we can make sense and meaning for SWIFT of everything we sense/spot outside. It’s what I would call: creating a knowledge flow out of our knowledge stock. I have some wild dream to one day have an “Innotribe University”, where we have internal and external 101 and 102 courses on for example big data, digital identity, etc. But I would like it to “emerge” from the brown bag sessions and other initiatives: again, seed a lot, see what works, be a gardener for the new promising species, incubate, grow, repeat.

Part of this cluster is a new initiative that I have under preparation: “corporate rebels united”. I am a big believer of viral infection of companies by planting seed “bombs” throughout the organization. People who act genuinely from their true self, from their true force, with no fear for sticking out their neck. Expect soon a website and on-line community where you can meet inspiring corporate rebels worldwide.

The theme of dancing is back there as well: it will indeed be about dancing with constraints. From rather simple constraints like time and budget, to more complicated challenges like keeping the SWIFT “Castle” deeply involved, and balancing and mixing some other internal projects that have clear touch points with the DAG.

It’s a real challenge for me, as I have a tendency to “give-up” too soon when involving internal resources. But I like the challenge, as it is one of perseverance.

Innovation seeds for Lite Application Platform

Whereas the above is about a 30-30-30% of my time in 2012, I look forward to collaborating with my colleagues on phase-2 of “LAP-15”.

LAP stands for “Lite application platform” and “15” refers to the 2015 strategy of SWIFT, and is a continuation of the Alliance Lite project that I was part of and launched in 2008 at Sibos Vienna. As in our team, we have learned quite a lot in our pilots and prototypes about B2B marketplaces, that thinking can be re-injected in LAP. Also some of the ideas articulated in the Digital Asset Grid project with respect to API’s will most probably be of great interest to LAP15.

A dream mission:

I have said it many times, and repeat again: I have a dream job. After having prepared my brand new presentation “The Soul of Innovation: a story about DJ’s, Painters, Pirates and Corporate Rebels”, I probably have to re-word this.

What we do in the Innotribe team is not a “job”. We are on a mission. So, based on that, I can happily state:

“I don’t have a job, I have a dream mission”.

That combined with a boss and organization that wants me to dance internally and externally: what else do you need ;-)

11 Responses

[…] 2012: my boss wants me to dance! We are getting towards the end of the year, and time has come to nail down the Innotribe 2012 objectives of our team members. Last Friday, I had my regular 1-1 with my boss Kosta Peric @copernic… Source: petervan.wordpress.com […]

Love this Peter. I love your idea of putting these out transparently. I have put many of my yearly (personal with some professional) goals on my blog, but never gone so far as to put my business goals. I may just join you in this organizational transparency. :) And yes, let’s dance!

Looking at your Strengths-based society diagram, I know you will be so interested in the “I Am Fish Head Movie” which does talk about the corporate world a lot. http://www.fisheadmovie.com/thinkers . So putting the words ‘evangelism’ and ‘dance’ together that makes me think of the traditional Christian hymn that my school did when I was much younger: Lord of the Dance: I danced in the morning when the world was begun. I danced with the moon and the stars and the sun; I danced down from heaven and I danced to earth………